SMALL TOWN CHANGES: WHAT ARE WE TO DO WITH SO MANY SMALL TOWNS IN AMERICA

America’s towns

The United States is known for its diverse major metropolitan cities. But what about the small towns and cities in America that hold less than 100,000 as its population. Who comes from across the country and around the world to visit these unknown locations? And the answer to that question is no one. Trust and believe, I come from a small town in the Midwest; population 75,000.

And I can tell you first hand, people don’t visit, we as Racine citizens of Wisconsin spend our time and money elsewhere. So what happens to a city where people spend outside? The problem is that the places where they spend increase in value, but their places decrease.

the stats

The United States is home to a lot more small towns and cities than major cities. As a matter of fact, the graph below shows the following data collected from a statistical website regarding America’s towns and cities. The website where this information can be found is: click → statista. As you can see we have 85% of America’s 19,505 towns/cities are populated with 10,000 or less people, while American major cities constitute for less than 1%. As a matter of fact, we have only 10 cities in American with over 1 million inhabitants.

what to do with all these places?

Now, with so many places, what are chances that we condense some of these cities and make a few more majors over time. The options are either take some of the cities with 100,000 that are close in proximity and make them into 500,000 to 1 million cities; or we could take a group of 10,000 to 20,000 towns and make them into medium sized cities in proximity of major cities.

Because think about this in context of jobs. No one is bringing jobs to a town of less than 10,000; hell, even a small city of less than 100,000 people. There need to be enough of a population to sustain the city or else how do you do so. That’s why when presidential candidates run for office saying they will create jobs, it aids major cities. But the small towns and cities fall off.

land value

What to do with all this unused land?” Because there are just too many places where too much is not being properly utilized. But, we can’t use a lot of land for crop because due to so much privately owned, overly urbanized, and preserved, our 1.9 billion acres we have dwindles down to a small amount. But we have to do something because our population is spread over these places.

But what you’re noticing is a young generation moving to bigger cities from their small towns. And as a generation dies off, you’ll have a whole host of small ghost towns, and massive major cities with populations exceeding 15 – 20 million people.